


How to Stay Warm in New York City

by lousy_science



Category: White Palace (1990)
Genre: F/M, Misses Clause Challenge, New York City, Post-Movie(s), Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 17:30:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5464952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lousy_science/pseuds/lousy_science
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nora has worked a few things out. Some of the stuff, she still needs time with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Stay Warm in New York City

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HoneyBeez](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoneyBeez/gifts).



Nora always tried to buy her cigarettes from the same bodega, the one with a statue of the Virgin Mary in the window. The place didn’t have a name, only the words “CANDY GROCERY” printed across the awning. She’d stand outside, draped in the big coat Max had bought her from Barneys, feeling the Calvin Klein label radiating at her neck, and she and the Virgin would chat. She’d usually start walking back halfway through the second cigarette, having exorcised her workday and settled the same point with Mary. _Those will probably kill you_ , Mary would say, and Nora would point out that no one ever got out alive.

Mary thought she sounded bitter. _I am telling the truth_ , Nora would insist, _and if I don’t tell the truth it’ll kill me quicker than these things_.

 _How’s Max?_ the Virgin would ask, and the first thought Nora would have was of the taste of his come, and how he’d always kiss her afterwards, unafraid of her mouth. Unafraid of any part of her. _He doesn’t mind my bitterness_ , she’d answer. _Max knows how life toughens you up in places_. She made a little offering of ash to the ground and sent the smoke up to heaven. Before walking away, she and the Virgin would swap assurances that they both loved one other.

Nora remembered the white marble Virgin at Our Lady of the Holy Cross back in St. Louis. When Nora was a kid she spent every Sunday wanting to reach up and touch her, but like the bodega Virgin behind the storefront glass, she was unreachable except through prayer.

The way Max looked in the afterglow, it was like that. Marble. But not unreachable. Nora would touch him and check his heartbeat, to know for certain that he was still there with her.

CANDY GROCERY had a tiny postcard stand. Every picture was the same, a neon sunset over the Manhattan skyline. Nora suspected she was the only person who ever bought them, one every two weeks, to mail back to Judy. _Hey Lady,_ she’d scrawl, _New York is still here and so am I_.

The bodega was Nora’s gateway back to Dogtown. Mary’s face was the same in both places, even if in New York she was smaller, and plastic instead of marble. She’d buy stamps and postcards to send back to her sister, and the packets of Lucky Strike cigarettes fit in her palm in New York just as well as they did in Missouri.

Growing up, her mother’s face was always creased in a frown. Nora had preferred looking up at Mary. Then she discovered Marilyn Monroe. Nora started collecting pictures of her and sticking them up on her wall, underneath the portraits of ivory-faced saints that hung above her bed. Later there had been Joe Shaughnessy, four years older than her and golden like a matinee idol, waiting at the school gates for his girlfriend, a scrappy thing called Kathy who faded utterly in comparison with him. Joe had never looked at Nora, but she watched him carefully. It got to the point where she had memorized everything: his face, his askew stance, the leather jacket he’d wear, the curl of hair that had hung over his brow. In the middle of class or late night in bed, all Nora had to do was close her eyes to see him. But it wasn’t ever enough just to remember. If a few days pass without spotting him, she would ache inside with a new kind of hunger.

Eventually there were boys who did look back at her. They came along a few years later, when her tits appeared and she began to grow her hair out. She could remember some of them when she closed her eyes, still. There was George, the jazz musician she’d spent a giddy weekend in a motel room with; the first black man she’d ever so much as kissed, and who soon talked her all the way out of her panties. She’d left him in the motel room bathroom when she walked in on him hammering out a line of cocaine next to the sink.

Shortly after that, she’d taken up with Michael. A nasty son of a bitch when drunk, but he’d given Nora her baby. He’d been born with Michael’s blue eyes and none of his temper. Her son had been pure sweetness. His face was her favorite.

Nora knew what Janey, Max’s wife, looked like. There were photos around. Max’s mother, Edith, had made up a wedding album bound in some satiny stuff, and when Max went back to St. Louis to get things out of storage it had come back to New York with him, crammed in a box with Little League trophies and dog-eared paperbacks. Janey reminded Nora of Kathy, Joe’s girlfriend, who’d been pretty enough until she stood next to her beautiful boyfriend. When you thought blondes, you thought head-turners, like Marilyn. But in all their pictures as a couple, Janey’s small, sweet features had dimmed in contrast with her husband. Max had been so happy in those pictures, and Max happy was unspeakably stunning.

If Nora ever looked through the album when Max was out of the apartment, that was why. Not because she felt anything bitter towards poor, quiet-looking Janey.

Max’s face usually looked all-knowing. It was rare to see him unsure, but Nora found that was just as delightful. Sometimes when they were fucking, Max would do something to her and only realize that he had a few moments afterwards, his brain playing catch-up with his inventive hands, legs, cock. Nora loved watching the comprehension dawn on his face, his expression sharpening in shock, then softening. He was built strong and upright, like the teenage boys she had run around with back in school, but pretty like a girl. And always thinking, thinking, thinking. Until he’d go and act like a dog in heat, grabbing her on the way out of the shower, or flipping her over for a second round, or waking her up from a nap with his head under her skirt.

She arrived at the apartment and saw that Max was watching TV. His body was laid out, feet up on the coffee table, arms across the couch, the frantic activity of his brain turned down, like a weapon put aside.

In a moment he’d hear her close the door and jump up, hug her, bitch about his day, let her know if Judy had called. They’d have dinner together. The thinking would start up again. That was fine, but right now Nora just wanted to look at him.

 

= = =

Nora knew enough about walking out of fights to have grabbed her coat before slamming the door. It was cold, and she liked the cold about as much as she liked the dark. Max would stay in the apartment, pacing and tidying. That was what got at her tonight, his insistence at having the one bowl for fruit, and another for the mail, and a special candy dish for the keys, as opposed to throwing everything together and trusting that a person had sense enough to tell the difference between a banana and a letter.

He was insufferable when he got like that. Pinched, a walking cluster headache, and all because of a newspaper headline, or a comment at work, or Nora’s slippers left out in the tiny hallway. Max couldn’t neaten her into tidy corners.

The phrase was _anal-retentive_. Nora had only been teasing, trying to make her point, but Max’s expression had drawn up immediately, shifting from uptight to defiant.

She dug her hands into her pockets. This coat was sturdy. But not as comfortable as their apartment, which was her favorite place in New York.

Her cigarettes were there in her coat pocket, along with a lighter, her house keys, ten dollars and change, and a hair tie. Not kept in a pocketbook like a neat Madison Avenue wife would carry with her, Nora figured, but much handier for sudden getaways.

She lit a cigarette and headed out towards the river. It would take too long to get to the water’s edge, but it was nice to know it was there ahead of her. After a few blocks she’d turn down one of the right angled streets that appealed to Max so much, then turn again, long enough for another cigarette and for Max to have grown anxious. Even though she had her keys on her, he would worry. She’d buy him a packet of caramel wafers from that 24-hour place on the corner. When she got home she’d let him kiss her until he felt consoled.

The smoke followed her, wreathing her with protection.

Nora had taken up smoking when she was seventeen, when she started working in a turkey processing plant. That brought her up short; spending her days prepping bird corpses in the middle of winter had been so different from the summer months that were just behind her, when she’d swum in the local pools in a brand new swimsuit and been fitted for her first diaphragm.

The turkey money got spent on cigarettes and make up. It was too little to get her out of her mother’s house and into a place of her own. She hadn’t been able to move out until her friend Loretta had gotten her a job waiting tables at Jerry’s Diner on Hampton Avenue. Leaving the stink of the plant behind her, she had taken as many shifts there as she could. Red lipstick on and hair piled high, Nora made good tips. She and Loretta had stayed in a two-bed apartment filled with all the girl things they wanted. It had been a mess, but it was their mess. None of the boys they brought back ever complained about the piles of magazines, the candy wrappers on the floor, or all the toiletries scattered around the bathroom.

Nora had to scrub the bathroom floors as punishment in Catholic school. The bleach used to make her eyes water. The last time it had happened, she‘d taken the bucket full of soapy muck and thrown it down the corridor. Sister Evangeline had stepped out of her office and looked at Nora with pure hatred. Nora had looked back, hating her back just as much, before walking out. She never went back. Summer break had started soon after anyway, then there’d been the turkey plant job, after that, the diner.

Mary, she was sure, understood how she couldn’t stay there, crawling on the floor cleaning up other people’s dirt, not when she was told it was in the name of Jesus. Nora wasn’t so sure that Max would get it. But then again, she’d never given him the chance to listen to her story. She turned a corner, tapping her thumb against the filter of her cigarette. Max hadn’t gone to the sorts of schools where they made you do things like that for practically nothing, just for looking the wrong way at some miserable nun or for passing a note in class. For thinking about boys instead of doing alegebra and getting told that you were stupid, and a sinner, being pointed to the janitor’s closet.

She would give Max the caramel wafers and ask him to listen. Then she’d promise to remember and use the right bowl for fruit, or whatever it was. Nora could at least try.

 

= = =

Max licked the fingers he’d had inside of her, finger pads lying heavily on his full lower lip, looking out at some spot on the wall. Nora didn’t follow his gaze, preferring to watch him as he caught his breath.

Nora struck a match and thought that it might get cold eventually, with the bedcovers all on the floor and the door left wide open after they’d crashed through it. Their feet had known where to go, but then Max had hoisted her leg around his waist and made to carry-haul her in and they’d both lost balance. Damn near ended the night with a concussion instead of flailing onto the mattress. Max had turned the air blue. “Fucking _Jesus_ holy goddamn shit!”

But he’d held on to her. The boy was smart. And he had excellent coordination.

The ashtray--a large glass blob that looked amber or green, depending on the angle--looked gold tonight in the dim light of their bedroom. Nora struck a match. She never smoked inside, except for one after sex. They had reached an agreement on that, in a bargaining session where Nora had, unfairly to Max’s mind, utilized blowjobs as a negotiation tool.

Just one cigarette. She held it in the hand that wasn’t sitting over Max’s heart, feeling his chest rise and fall.

Nora knew he wanted her to quit. In Max’s way of thinking, she had to quit for herself, and not for him, so he never asked her directly. It was a silly way of trying to get what you want. Love was the only reason she had to stop.

Max worked for a non-profit agency that made “health awareness campaigns.” Nora couldn’t see the difference between writing ads for health awareness and writing ads for lawnmowers and deodorant, except that people actually needed lawnmowers and deodorant.

But it made him happy. Happier, at least, than the teaching jobs had done, with the grinding bureaucracy that drove him him up the wall and the endless rounds of budget cuts. It paid for things like her coat and restaurant dinners where they would tip their servers lavishly.

In the last couple of months month he had been working on something called “Smoke-free Spaces.” They were planning to put pictures of tumors up in subway stations. Make people even more miserable on their commute to work.

Sex and smoking were two of her favorite things. She enjoyed them both more with Max than anyone else she’d ever known.

Her Lucky Strike was half burned-down. She crushed the stub down and waved the smoke off with her hands. Watched it curl up and disappear, and wondered what Mary would say when Nora showed up to talk to her without a cigarette in her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [ ysse_writes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ysse_writes) for lovely beta help. Any remaining mistakes or misfires are entirely my own.


End file.
